Application Integration: An Intelligent Way to Modernize your Data & Applications

Why Modernize?

A recent McKinsey study of enterprises found that legacy systems account for 74% of their IT spend while continuing to be a drag on innovation. Hence, the rush to modernize data and business application to a scalable, cloud-native app environment is undeniable. No wonder that application modernization is currently an $11B industry forecasted to explode to $25B by 2025.

What does modernization mean? Ask a dozen IT and business leaders and you’ll likely get a dozen different answers. For many, modernization means replacing on-premises legacy systems with more flexible, user-friendly, cloud-native applications. For others, it means integrating mission-critical legacy systems and SaaS services. Others yet will highlight refactoring and breaking down legacy monolithic applications into a collection of small, loosely coupled microservices.

The shape and scope of modernization may vary widely, but its goals are common across organizations and industries – to be agile and reduce cost and risk. How? Let’s say a business wants to expand its suppliers list and quickly. If your supplier integration is coded in a “green-screen,” monolithic application, making this change will take months. On the other hand, if the integration services are built on modern software architecture principles such as microservices and exposed via APIs, by the time the business finds a new supplier, IT will be ready to onboard them. No wonder legacy apps are more expensive because they need highly skilled and expensive programmers to maintain and update. They are risky as these programmers are hard to find, the system may go out of support contract, or the supporting vendor may go out of business.

iPaaS & Application Integration – The Fastest, Least Expensive, Least Risky Way to Modernize

Regardless of the technologies or business goals, integration is essential and the fastest path to modernization. No matter what, businesses are not going to summarily replace all their legacy applications. There will be some tried and true, perhaps mission-critical workhorses that will remain in the portfolio, or at least will take time to replace. How will you ensure your mission-critical legacy ERP application is able to communicate with your modern cloud application for sales automation, human resources, or marketing? Through integration. Integration is also the fastest path to data and application modernization. It’s the fastest, cheapest, and lowest risk way to extract the most value out of your legacy apps, by connecting your legacy with your modern apps. No refactoring, no re-architecting, no rationalizing needed.

APIs are a popular technology to enable integration between two or more datastores and applications. APIs are also a great way to modernize. You can leave a legacy application in place but securely expose its functions or data via APIs. This approach enables new,cloud nativeapplications to simply take advantage of the capabilities of existing systems and data. Another common pattern of application modernization involves refactoring and breaking down a monolithic application into a collection of small, loosely coupled microservices. The modern day iPaaS (integration platform as a service) supports the goals of application modernization initiatives in several ways by:

• offering integration capabilities suitable for many on-premises scenarios,
• providing the ability to create and manage APIs,
• and by providing the ability to build cloud-native microservices.

Intelligent Data and Application Modernization

At the highest level, there are three foundationalcapabilitiesthat an intelligent application integration solutionbrings for modernization:

1. A no-code, no-build development of real-time integrations for application data synchronization and data-centric APIs for data access
2. Orchestration and coordination of disparate and disconnected systems to replace human intervention, improving costs and development effort
3. Internal and external data sharing using different latencies, and different models with a hands-free model using an intelligent structure parser

Only with Informatica

In our Fall Launch virtual event, we will be highlighting how we not only enable integration between hundreds of legacy and modern data and apps, but also how only Informatica’s AI-powered, cloud-native, enterprise iPaaS goes way beyond offering “plain old” application and data integration and connectivity. We infuse intelligent automation in your integration logic to drive agile innovation. We offer extreme enterprise scale to support business growth and minimize upfront CAPEX investments. We offer a no code/no build environment to enable self-service and democratization of integration. We offer data quality so that data can be trusted to offer intelligent business insights. We offer multi-cloud support to offer you flexibility to implement your integration platform on the infrastructure of your choice. These capabilities support your cloud-first/cloud-native strategy as a way to align your business imperatives – agility, flexibility to adjust to ever-shifting expectations, being as cost efficient as possible, while still enabling the business to innovate to continue to be a leader, and having the resilience to withstand unforeseen circumstances.

Check out what’s new in Informatica’s enterprise iPaaS (register to join the live event October 13 in North America, October 14 in EMEA, and October 15 in APJ). Modernize your on-premises applications and build cloud-native ones with best-of-breed capabilities for every stage of your enterprise integration and data management requirements, with services including application and API integration, data integration, mass ingestion, data quality, integration hub, B2B, monitoring, security and more, all from a single, cloud-native, AI-powered platform – only with Informatica.